Search This Blog

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Hi Everybody! Sorry about not having a scrappy saturday linkup last weekend as I was crazy busy with family visiting and having J's birthday party which you can check out in the previous post.
Here are some of the cool links from the last scrappy saturday...and let me say it was tough deciding which to feature because the last link up had a TON of awesome posts.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Princess Birthday Party

5 years old and having a royal ball!

J had her 5th Birthday party last weekend and it was a BALL! Literally! She requested that all her friends come dressed up as princesses and have a dance party at the ball. Here she is wearing her Repunzel dress, which I don't think I ever posted, it was my first time making a dress and I made it for Halloween to go with her GLOWING REPUNZEL HAIR which is a tutorial you can check out with a link to the tutorial for this dress at the end. The party turned out to be really fun and a everything went smoothly, thanks to having the help of my parents and brother and my awesome friend who let me borrow her folding table and a ton of strands of lights! We barely pulled it all together before the guests arrived! lol, my mom was still decorating cupcakes and the little cake as they arrived and the guys were in the basement still getting the ballroom set up!

As the girls arrived they decorated a princess gown favor box and filled it with some M&Ms. I just put down a big piece of cardboard and a bunch of crayons, markers and stickers. I found these cute wedding dress favor boxes in the wedding section at the dollar tree they came in packs of 10. They wrote their name on the bottom when they were done and took them home at the end of the party.

As they finished decorating their dresses, they came and sat in the Princess Chair, (something I picked up at the thrift store and have been meaning to give a makeover, it's in great condition, I just want to change it) and had their make up done, received a crown (those tiny comb crowns in the favor section at walmart). And then they each posed for a Princess Portrait with the Frog Prince (that frog is a puppet from my husband's childhood! They saved a lot of his toys and it's cool to see the kids play with them now)

don't look at my hair! I didn't have time to do anything with it and it was so lumpy and bumby! lol

Princess Portrait-which the guests will receive with their thank you note.

Meanwhile, as they all finished up their dresses, makeover and portrait with the frog prince, they talked and played with balloons.

Next we played some games that I came across online, I can't way where because I was REALLY tired after a long day and my dad looked up Princess Party Games on his Ipad and just started listing off ideas to me and I have no idea what he was looking at.

First we did a Princess Walk. I printed off pictures of various Princesses and related characters and places them on the floor in a circle and then had them walk around the pictures to music. Everytime the music stopped, my mom would call out a character and whoever was on that character got a candy necklace. We played until everyone got a necklace. My mom looked and saw where they were standing and whoever didn't have a necklace yet, she would just call out whatever character they were standing on. Unfortunately, not long after the girls were complaining about having sticky necks, and J kept using so many diaper wipes to get rid of the sticky feeling her neck was SO red.

Next we played Pin the Pan on Flynn Ryder followed by a Snow White Game called Pass the Poison Apple. They sat in a circle and as the music played, they would pass an apple around. When the music stopped, whoever was holding the apple had to fall asleep. At the end of the game, the last person to have the apple had to wake everyone else up with a sweet kiss...they went around and placed a little flower shaped marshmallow on the persons' lips to wake them up. Hershey kisses were suggested, but I didn't feel like messing with the wrappers.

Next we went outside to find Cinderella's lost glass slipper! I hid J's Cinderella dress up shoe it in the yard and helped them in the right direction using Hot and Cold. Here they are searching for it!

After that they came inside to do presents and cupcakes because they couldn't go to the ball on an empty stomach!

And this is a HORRIBLE picture but they all turned out blurry of the cupcake table.

After eating cupcakes and snacking on some snacks and pink princess lemonade, they all grabbed a small bottle of bubbles and went back outside. bubbles were also from the wedding section of the dollar tree you get 9 bottles for a dollar! We put a colorful heart sticker on each one so they didn't look like wedding bubbles.

They had fun blowing bubbles and playing outside some more and then it was time for the pinata...I love this picture...

The pinata was a tough one, so after each princess had multiple tries, dad came in and busted it open.

After they had collected their loot, I brought out their treat bags and we had them put everything in there and wrote their names on them real quickly and then it was FINALLY time for the ball! We walked them around to the basement door entrance and they walked in to fun music from Tangled, Enchanted, Lizzy McGuire etc. Them all dancing around like crazy in their princess dresses was one of the cutest things I've ever seen!!!

Here is a video post party showing the lights, the guys did a great job!

The party was scheduled for 2 hours and we may have gone just a tiny bit over as they were having so much fun dancing, but it was really fun. I was kind of anxious at first because I've never hosted a birthday party at my home before, the only other party we did was for her 3rd party and we had it at a big park so I didn't really have to do anything other than brings snacks and cupcakes. If my parents weren't here to help, I probably wouldn't have been able to be as organized with doing the games and getting everything ready in time and my mom surprised J with the pinata last minute when she saw it was just under $10 at walmart and we just put some of the goodies we were already going to get for the treat bags into the pinanta.

I forgot to take a picture of the cupcake table before the party, so this is after the fact, so there isn't as much there but you get the idea.

For the cake and cupcakes, I used the gluten free strawberry cupcake recipe from my Cooking for Isaiah cookbook with a basic vanilla buttercream frosting using vegetable shortening instead of butter and vanilla coconut milk instead of dairy milk so these were gluten and dairy free. The kids loved them, it's really a great recipe, one of my friends was so impressed because it was the first time her daughter has ever finished a cupcake!

Princess Lemonade made with pink lemonade and sprite.

Bubbles with stickers....simple, cheap, easy fun!

As they left J gave them a wand, a lollipop and the flower straw they was intended for the lemonade but we didn't end up using, along with their treat bags and candy dress boxes. They definitely didn't go home empty handed, I just kept finding cute little things that didn't cost very much that were either on sale or on clearance or were just a regular cute inexpensive item in the party favor section.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

I originally saw this cool bakery sign wall decor on a blog header over at Junkin Junky about a year ago, and she has since changed the image on her blog header so I can't really show you. A couple months later I was looking for it (this was before pinterest) and found the bakery sign over at the Curious Sofa, although it's not there anymore either, but luckily I saved it because I FINALLY did it!

I started with a 12x24 inch gallery wrapped canvas that I got on sale really cheap years ago...before I even became a mom, which was at least 5 years ago as JJ's bday comes up next week! I didn't have any black acrylic paint, so I used J's Black Tempura/Poster Paint but due to my painting classes from college, I still have a difficult time using any paint straight from the tube...even black, so I mixed the black with some of my burnt umber...don't know if it made any difference, but oh well...I painted the entire canvas black.

Then I put a piece of chalk in a bag and smashed it with a hammer. I used a wide dry paint brush and brushed the chalk powder onto the black canvas to make it look like a chalkboard. Who needs chalkboard paint when you can use black poster paint and basic crayola chalk to make a faux chalkboard finish?

I inverted the original image from curious sofa and enlarged it to the size I wanted in word and had it print onto several pages. Then did the ol scribble chalk on the back and trace the letters onto the canvas. I did try practicing my freehand at first which wasn't terrible, but I just wanted it to be uniform and even and so I traced the lettering on.

When I started, I planned to paint the letters with white paint, but right before starting thought...um since I'm making it look like a chalkboard...why don't I just use chalk? duh...

To keep the chalk for smudging and wiping off, I took it out to the garage and sprayed it with fixative. You can find that in the drawing section a store that carries art supplies.

I made this chalkboard bakery sign to go next to the door to the deck because there are two empty areas of wall, on the opposite wall, I just threw up this pizza paddle we already had.

There...better than having nothing up there on those walls....slowly getting the house less bare.

I just had to take a pic from this angle because I love the light fixture and brick fireplace in the kitchen...

Best part of the new kitchen decor? It was free! I just used things that I've had on hand.

Monday, March 19, 2012

Does your toddler get undressed in bed, remove their diaper and get poop everywhere?

Well....mine has started to, and today was by far the worst...the other days it was just a little smeared up and down his legs as he pulled his diaper off but today it was $%#^ EVERYWHERE!!! Not the best way to start a Monday.....or any day for that matter! He is like a little Houdini, I even put him to bed recently in a onesie shirt and osh kosh overalls but he's such a string bean, he shimmied his way right out the top. I was so confused at first, the shirt and overalls were perfectly intact, nothing undone, the shirt, with it's long sleeves were still inside the overalls as if on display on a hanger. So after complaining on facebook this morning I got some ideas I hadn't tried yet...putting a one piece sleeper on backwards. The weather has dramatically changed here so his sleepers that fit are too hot, so I dug through his older sister's baby clothes and found this 12-18 month sleeper. It's good it was a little small for him, hopefully he won't be able to shimmy out the neck hole on these! And I put em on backwards so as of now I'm hoping this works....I'll find out in the morning! IT BETTER! I am NOT interesting in cleaning up poop smeared bedding, bumper pads and crib rails...not to mention kid totally covered. BLEGH!

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Hey all! I just wanted to start off this weekend by thanking all of you who participate in scrappy saturdays! I get so excited to see who has linked up and check out your awesome projects. I wish I had time to leave more comments when I visit all your awesome blogs, lately, I'm just lucky if I have time to make a quick post and that's about it. So I just wanted to make sure you all know how much I appreciate all of you...even those of you who don't link up but still visit and look around! :)